Category Archives: childhood

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Pixied and Permed: My Life in Haircuts and Headbands


My life is largely a history of headbands and bangs, an ongoing effort to make thin, fine hair thicker and fuller, an evolution from baby bald to big girl curl.

It’s basically been a bad hair life, one I’ve tried to rewrite in pixies and perms, bobs and barrettes.

Hope you enjoy this scrapbook of styles—my history in haircuts and curls.

A Baby in Bangs:

My mom was big into bangs, or so it seemed to me. Maybe it was the era–what one did with babies’ hair in the early ’60s.  Either way, I wore my toddler locks chopped short across the forehead, a bridge of bang above big, blue eyes.  


Growing up with Brown Hair and Braids:

After first grade I insisted on growing my hair long.  It may have been the Brady Bunch effect—seeing Cindy with blonde ponytails and big bows.  It may have been primary school, an effort to braid my brown into bigger girl style, curly girl chic.   Regardless, I started second grade, a studious girl with lengthier locks.  

Professional Permed:

I finished my formal education in the mid-eighties—a time when huge hair was everywhere.  It was an era before products could mousse any hair into almost any style; and big-headed professor or not, with thin, fine hair, only a perm gave me personal puff.

Mad-Headed Medusa:

I lived much of the ’90s fighting bipolar disorder.  It was a decade spent revolving in and out of psychiatric hospitals with hair as varied as my mood.  Sometimes it was short, other times a little longer—even eventually I had mildly Medusa-like curls.

Lesbian Locks:

I emerged a saner, better version of myself after the millennium turned, embracing my sexuality and cutting my curls.  Whether or not I unconsciously morphed into the stereotype of cropped lesbian locks, I’ll never know.  However, I spent the first half of the last decade opening the closet door— gay pride with pixie cut.

A Blogger in Bobs:

When I returned to work mid-decade, I marked my passage back to the writing life by bobbing my hair and falling madly sanely in love.  With Sara, I’ve lived, luggage packed, passport in hand, first in Vietnam, later in Haiti.  I wonder what haircut I’ll have for our next destination.

How has your hair evolved?  Do you have a story to tell in bangs and barrettes?

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Real Boys do Cook Quiche: a Reflection on Fathers’ Day


(in memory of Sam’s daddy Dino–Happy Fathers’ Day from far away)

Much to our delight, my nephew Sam came to visit Sara and me this weekend.  His mother, my younger sister Lynn, is in Cuba for 10 days, so Sam has a series of family, friends, and camp to keep him company.

And his stop Friday and Saturday just happened to be our home.  Goodness–what a gift to us!

The boy is precious–kind, smart, creative, with not only a soul of gold, but also a spirit bright and brilliant.

Sam is eleven.  He plays football, basketball, and a bit of soccer.  He golfs.

But his primary passion is in the kitchen.  He loves to cook, to bake, to create.  I don’t imagine there are many eleven-year-old boys in Kentucky whipping up quiche in the kitchen.  But Friday morning that’s just what Sam did.

So today–a journey in photographs–a quiche-cooking boy–a foodie’s young life:

Aunt Kathy holds her new-born nephew–Sammy’s first day of life:

for the love of nephew!

He’s grown a bit and is visiting Aunt Kathy again:

rock-a-bye-baby

Sam and Daddy–(Sam’s daddy died when Sam was only six.):

Sam adored his daddy!

Sam and big brother Johnny visit Santa:

seasons greetings from the nephews

Sam graduates from pre-school:

entering the land of "Big Boy"

Sam tends to under-arms:

Sammy does deodorant.

When Sammy was six, we rode together in our town’s 4th of July parade:

I pedaled and pulled. Sammy sat.

Sam’s school picture:

Our boy is growing up.

This weekend Sam and I ate dinner at the Atomic Cafe, a block from our house in downtown Lexington:

We each ate shrimp linguine.

When Sam visits, he and I almost always collaborate on an art project:

Sam adds a logo to his painted bottle of wine.

Saturday morning we visited our local farmers’ market:

Sara and Sam

Smoothie goes green at Farmers’ Market:

pedaling toward smoothie

Yet another bike invloved in Sam’s Saturday:

Riding home fom Farmers' Market

So Sam is off to camp this week, but with Daddy gone, our boy has big pants to fill, as Fathers’ Day approaches:

Sam pulls himself up, britches better than boot straps

Happy Fathers’ Day, Dino!  We love you and know if you were here, you’d assure your son, that real boys do cook quiche.

But then Sam knows that already!

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With the Edges of her Eyes


Today I’d like to share a poem I wrote about my maternal grandmother, who died in 1980, when I was only a senior in high school.

My grandmother was probably my favorite person on the planet.  I adored her and thought, as a teenager, that I could deal with just about any challenge, as long as it didn’t involve losing her.

Nana and I, two years before her death

My grandmother, born in 1903, was beautiful as a young girl:

However, when I was myself an adolescent, Nana fell and broke her hip.  She  was subsequently unable to reach her own feet, so when I visited her, my favorite place to stay in the summers, I often washed them for her–something I allude to in the poem that follows.

nana

(in memory of Martha Gilbert Kunkle)

we are oblique and
at odd angles:
     me at the feet
     i once washed
     on a regular basis
 
in the dream:
     she is getting older
                melting or
                shrinking
 
looking at me
only with the edges
     of her eyes.
 

Though often in my dreams my grandmother is still alive, I’m grateful in the mornings  to know Nana, in all the ways that matter,  has never really left–blessing enough–in my own now aging  eyes.

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A Sister Lost: a Twin Remembered


In honor of Memorial Day, I’m remembering my identical twin sister Martha, who died several days after we were born. 

Twins born a month premature had little chance of survival in 1962, a time before medical science knew how to save the tiniest of infants.  I weighed just over 3 pounds, Marty just over 2.  The doctors promised my parents neither of us would survive, but it seems even then I was determined to beat the odds.

This poem is written in the voice of my sister, who describes our experience in the womb:  the veins lining the inside of the placenta we shared, her efforts to recite poetry about our time together , the fact that I was growing more quickly than she.

Hope you appreciate this poem about a primal kind of bonding and the profound sadness of losing someone whose DNA was identical to mine, someone who mirrored me even before the beginning, when “I” was “we” and “we” were wombed as one.

 

 To my twin sister who lived to tell about it

 

The room, which was poorly lit

     and warmer than we wanted,

     curved around us

               like planetarium

                    ceiling

               like the rind

                    of cantaloupe

                    as seen from the inside

 

I remember how you traced

     the networking of veins

     with the stub that became

                  the index finger

                  of your left hand

              

While I recited garbled

     poems about

           the splitting

                  of space

          the fact that you were

                 gathering more

                 matter

  

 

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Writing Round the Vertigo


At the beginning of Mental Health Awareness Month, I posted a piece called “Leaving the Seclusion Room  (some not-so-crazy notes on recoverying from mental illness)” about my stay at an Oklahoma psychiatric facility.  In that post I wrote about the voices I heard—an echo of children’s chatter—a description that prompted a question from my friend Sarah, who asked if I had ever explored those voices poetically—exploited their poetic potential, so to speak.

It turns out, I had.

Sort of.

The poem I’ll share below is written in several voices that interrupt one another—echoing—overlapping—dizzying.  Though there’s only one child’s voice in the mix of layered sing-song, this poem reminds me of the voices I still sometimes hear during times of vertigo-inducing stress–a surreal “reality” that looks a bit like this:

(photo by John Drysdale, " High Living Crocodile," 1976)

So–I hope you’ll wind these stairs with me–

And take a listen—

 

Vertigo

 

My head is killing

     me and he is talking

     about the etiquette

          of date rape

 

     cassette in the player

     cassette in the player

 

          indigo

          girls

          indigo

 

Where have you been?

 

The staircase is winding

     off the edges of the lawn

     and I am here

                                  lavender

 

     lilies of the valley

     lilies

               of

                     the

                             valley

 

I’ve told you not to

     go there

 

     you

     you

 

There you

                     daughter in the photograph

                     age three in front

                     of an antique typewriter

Kathy--already a writer--age 3

Why can’t you be more like . . .

 

    lilies of the valley

     lilies

              of

                    the

                            valley

 

The world according to cats

     is not a crazy sphere

     of influence

                                 spinning

                                 spinning

 

          in my

 

     cassette in the player

     cassette in the player

 

          head

 

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A Prose Poem


Summer Circles Green

Summer circles green and my hair is growing another color, silver/white like tinsel or Christmas tree ornaments or snow on the slanted roof of the artist’s yellow house, who paints her daughter blonde, reclining as in a lawn chair, her oiled canvas stretching now in a museum down the road, where we, on Sunday mornings, relax like swans, drinking flavored coffee from blackened mugs so the darkened rims don’t show.  I despise the dirty rigs on my own blue mugs, like arctic circles, tea rings, skim milk spilling on the wooden floor beneath the picnic table benches.

Summer circles green and my hair is growing another color, preparing cob-webbed gowns we wear like gauze bandages, covering the cigarette burns on our wrists and upper arms, slices of roast beef for the noonday meal, when we should be eating turkey along with last year’s yellowed photographs, boxed memories of three years’ madness, the hospital gowns, green and open in the back, displaying what we’d prefer to hide behind some sturdier covering.

Summer circles green and my hair is growing another color, asking impossible questions about misplaced rooms and lilacs beside the brick house that stained my childhood brown, brown hair like dirty ponds in winter, though I pretended it was red, imagined I was burning, wondering—will I ever be consumed like bread crumbs scattered to the pigeons that roost on slate roofs, cooing, calling—